Here’s the deal…the Big Three are at it again. They’ve come back to the Hill, hats in hand, to try and con Congress into giving them a space at the bailout trough. So what’s changed since they were turned away and told to go back home and come up with a workable turnaround plan?

Marketing.

Yep. Ford’s chair drove all the way from Detroit to D.C. in an Escape Hybrid. Wow. There’s a PR move, if ever I’ve seen one. ‘Course, it would have been ever so much more effective if he’d done it a couple of weeks ago, instead of flying in with his corporate jet. “I just drove in from Detroit, and boy is my butt sore,” makes ever so much better a punchline than “I just flew in from Detroit, and boy is my stewardess tired.” Oh, and the Big Three CEOs have offered to take $1 a year for a salary! (No word on stock options and other incentives.) And they’ll give up the corporate jets! (Now we’re talkin’ pain!)

It’s interesting to see the Big Three get hip to appearances, and start doing something to make it at least look as if they’re trying to be contrite. Pity they didn’t come up with anything more than smoke and mirrors for a plan.

The simple fact is that none of the Big Three have a ghost of a chance of survival until they deal with the fact that their costs of manufacture are $1,500 higher than their competition.

Toyota, Nissan, BMW, Honda all build cars here, and build them better, faster and cheaper. Why? They don’t have unions dictating how many cars to build, how many people to keep on the job, and what models must be built, regardless of demand. Which is exactly what the unions have done to the Big Three. Oh, and they also put a gun to the heads of GM, Ford, and Chrysler as to wages, health care benefits, and pensions.

Oddly enough, I think marketing IS the solution. Just not in the way that it’s been used so far.

What needs to happen is that the Big Three CEOs need to man up, and come up with plans that address the real issues – specifically, the cost of manufacture. Once they are ready to propose the tough moves, they need to then market the plan – to Congress, to the UAW, to the shareholders and investor community, to the dealers, and suppliers…then ultimately to their customers.

When you present a plan that spreads the pain out among all the stakeholders, and that sharing that pain means the ultimate survival for the companies, and therefore the stakeholders. In the big picture, this works. On the smaller, more personal scale, it means that some will lose their jobs. Some will see their pensions and benefits shrink. Some will see their salaries cut. Everyone will feel pain. If you can use marketing to sell the wisdom of this plan to everybody, there’s a chance that restoring the principles of capitalism to the Big Three will save them. No guarantees. No promises. Because when you invoke free market capitalism, you live and die on supply and demand – not union rules, jobs banks, and Soviet-era 5 year plans.

Can marketing save the Big Three. Yes – if they market a plan that works. Otherwise, all the CEOs in the world driving all the hybrids in the world won’t save them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 1:21 pm and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.